The B-movie is still very much with us.

Weaver's randy, impatient, very funny performance is the main reason to see Imaginary Heroes.

She's (Dunst) the big reason the film rises above instantly rejectable formula to campy pop.

A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.

The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.

You get the sense that the cheap thrill of cheating is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. The movie feels just as inadequate emotionally and psychologically. There's a lot of outward behavior but no inner life.

As it is, Behind Enemy Lines will satisfy only those in search of a rousingly, if simplistically, patriotic bloodbath.

Hartley's loquacity and arguable pretentiousness are stemmed by his sense of play. Even when they run afoul, his movies still have the conviction of their fun. No Such Thing barely has any convictions at all.

once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness. The big alley-fight scene between Piper and David, in which the former tries to punch some awareness into the latter and make him put on the X-ray sunglasses, is as contrived as it is brutal. And the ending isn't much. The acting has the good sense not to try to be anything more than two-dimensional, though, which keeps the entertainment value at a lively comic-strip level. As sci-fi horror comedy, "They Live," with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with "Terminator" and "Robocop," even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps. [4 Nov 1988, p.52]

Takes a leaf from the "Psycho" handbook and abandons its star for stretches here and there.

Just a bunch of spotty sketches slapped together that will satisfy no one except the diehards.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

Part soap opera and part thriller, and it has the unique characteristic of being both undeveloped and overwritten.

The film's biggest problem, however, is its naive inability to understand that sex comedies, to amuse, must be about more than sex.

Had Spacey made Beyond the Sea 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been close to transporting.

The director, Beeban Kidron, handles the proceedings with an episodic aimlessness on par with Bridget's.

Full of action, but no soul.

Like everything in this humorless new genre, "Chronicles" comes with its own snap-together mythology.

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in The Day After Tomorrow are fantastically stupid.

Bland though it is, "Havana Nights" could be the start of a globe-bettering franchise -- and across history, too: "Dirty Dancing: Monticello Mornings"; "Dirty Dancing: Gaza Strip Afternoons."

Silly to the last drop of rationed water.

His (Green) new gross-out comedy is crude and stupid, but just as often rudely funny. It doesn't so much push the envelope as shred it.

Even older kids will understand that Pixar does it so much better, not because of their computers but because of an intelligent attention to script and character and craft. If the people running Disney don't understand that much anymore, maybe they should turn out the lights and go home.

Zemeckis and Hanks really seem to think they’re giving us a Christmas movie for the ages and a technology that will change cinema forever. They’re wrong on both counts. The Polar Express is merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul.

There are laughs here and there, and Graham and Klein aren't nearly as grating as what surrounds them. But there's no getting around the fact that far from seeming a labor of love, Say It Isn't So seems merely labored.

The movie's enthusiasm is as indelible and shiny as the lip gloss its star wears to bed.

You want the movie to stir your soul, push your intellect, or at the very least, break your heart. But it's such a repetitive and thinly constructed piece of filmmaking that the scope and complexity of Sampedro's case are turned to porridge.

Has a raggy charm, like the dogs, and a solid moral ending. For a late-summer children's film, it does the job.